Martin’s novels, which use character point-of-view chapters to cover the same incidents from a variety of perspectives, and which will almost certainly stretch this out longer.)īut HBO’s Game of Thrones is out of time, which means that Daenerys needed to be dispatched as efficiently as possible, before the show can even hint at what the country might look like with Daenerys on the Iron Throne. (At the very least, I can’t wait to read the events of the final two episodes in George R.R. It’s easy to imagine a different, longer version of this story-one that treats Daenerys’s rise to power not as an ending, but as the midpoint of the story, with the surviving characters striking reluctant alliances or plotting secret coups against an increasingly tyrannical Targaryen queen. Whether this felt like an out-of-nowhere twist or something the show had been setting up for years was largely up to the viewer- I’m somewhere in the middle, but I’ve read convincing arguments on both sides-but however you felt about it, it was safe to assume that dispatching Daenerys would be Game of Thrones’s endgame.īut before we get into how Game of Thrones actually did it, I want to pause and think about how-for a brief moment-this storyline looks exactly like the Game of Thrones of old. Last week’s episode alienated some viewers in a totally different way by turning Daenerys Targaryen into the show’s final villain.
![game of thrones season 8 episode 1 running time game of thrones season 8 episode 1 running time](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/i0BXeSFhiow/maxresdefault.jpg)
Of course, the final season has given us one big exception.